In the fall of 1994, I found myself double-dipping on theatrical releases. I went to see Star Trek: Generations twice (I still love it); same with Pulp Fiction (and I still love that one as well). I also went to see Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire twice over the opening weekend. The first viewing was with a group of friends, the second with my then-girlfriend. I don’t remember much about the latter, but I vividly remember the former, with one of the girls we were with crying afterwards about how “evil” the movie was.
Clearly, this wasn’t someone with much experience in horror movies.
At the time, mind you, there was a lot of controversy surrounding the film. Adapted by Rice herself from her classic 1976 novel, Interview With The Vampire was directed by Neil Jordan, the follow-up to his surprise 1992 hit, The Crying Game. The film cast Brad Pitt as the morose vampire Louis; Pitt was coming off of his scene-stealing performances in Thelma and Louise and True Romance, and his presence was assuredly going to bring in a female audience. Pitt would star alongside Antonio Banderas as Armand and Jordan’s Crying Game star Stephen Rea as Santiago. Meanwhile, Kirsten Dunst played Claudia, the eternally 12-year-old vampire girl.
The big coup for Interview With The Vampire, though, was casting Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat. Cruise was riding a huge commercial high, thanks to hits like Days of Thunder and The Firm. Lestat would be the actor’s first entry into the horror genre, a move that Anne Rice initially balked at, saying that the decision was “so bizarre; it’s almost impossible to imagine how it’s going to work.” Rice eventually walked back her comments after seeing Cruise bite into the role.
Interview With The Vampire was a reasonable hit at the time, grossing more than $224 million worldwide and attracting an audience in love with Tom Cruise who would likely not have seen the film otherwise.
I recently rewatched Interview With The Vampire to see how it held up for me, some 31 years after I first watched it on the big screen, and my feelings were decidedly mixed. While it looks good, gorgeously capturing the sights and sounds of Paris and New Orleans in the 1800s, I can’t help but feel that the film moves very, very slowly. Like, molasses slowly. Perhaps that’s to be expected, as the story of Interview With The Vampire is really about the character’s existential angst about their own existence. At least, that’s how it is for Pitt’s Louis and Dunst’s Claudia, who get little to no joy from their vampiric life. Contrast that with Tom Cruise’s always entertaining take on Lestat, a vampire who embraces who he is. All these years later, it’s clear that Cruise was having a blast with the role; the problem is, he’s maybe onscreen for half the film’s run time, which means we’re left with Louise and Claudia, and for me, they’re just too much of a snore. Having read the first four books in Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, I’d suggest that their ennui reads better on the page than in its film adaptation.
Interview With The Vampire certainly delivers a unique take on the genre; there’s a lot of sexiness on screen, certainly more than future vampire films like Twilight would deliver. There’s also a fair amount of bloodletting that occurs, and for anyone not versed in the world of horror, I could see why they’d be horrified by many of the images on screen, like the girl I previously mentioned was.
As well, keep in mind, I haven’t even mentioned Guns N ‘Roses’ contribution to the Interview With The Vampire soundtrack, with their take on The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” which rolled over the film’s end credits. It’s a version that led to the band imploding.
But that’s a story for another day.
Overall, on my rewatch, I found myself restless, and my engagement waned as the movie played on. Interview With The Vampire is very much of a moment in time for me, and, for my tastes, its lead actors would all go on to do much stronger work in similarly dark films. Check out Pitt in David Fincher’s Se7en, released just one year later, or Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Both films are horrific and feel timeless to me, unlike Interview With The Vampire.
